Dominic Hutton, HashiCorp
In a statement unsurprising to just about everybody, achieving reliability isn’t exactly straightforward. What would you do if your mission is to enable the teams in your organisation to progress towards it? You’re outnumbered and competing for service owners' finite attention against alternate incentives.
This is an honest reflection on techniques we relied on to enable teams to understand and make steps towards improving their reliability posture. We’ll look at some of the major activities we undertook along our journey as the sociotechnical system grew around us. Scaling our SRE-in-the-loop operational readiness assessments whilst trying to mitigate common reliability issues with platform primitives had us stretched thin. We invested in building out a reliability data platform for continuous attestation to help us scale our efforts. We'll also discuss our service review programme that involved collaborating with teams to surface architectural and operational readiness issues that they were experiencing.
Dominic is an engineer who has been doing engineer-y things long enough to understand the issue with appeal to accomplishment or tenure. He’s spent time within early stage startups trying to do it all through to large organisations with teams just for enabling groups of other teams.
He’s been privileged enough to work within all sorts of domains in software and reliability adjacent functions. He likes to point to the time he worked on large software systems and ground control hardware for satellite constellations but would feel he’s leading people astray if he neglected to mention his various stints serving fast food and coffee.
author = {Dominic Hutton},
title = {Is My Thing Reliable? Adventures in Driving Consistency of Reliability across the Organisation},
year = {2025},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}